


L'Appel du Vide

by niltia



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Angst, Depression, M/M, Unhappy Ending, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-14
Updated: 2019-02-14
Packaged: 2019-10-27 20:19:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17773577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/niltia/pseuds/niltia
Summary: The first time he uses the spore drive again, Paul sees Hugh in the network. He's pretty sure he's hallucinating, but that doesn't stop him from going back.





	L'Appel du Vide

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote most of this immediately after s2e02 and then never finished. Because of that, May is pretty dissimilar from how she is in the show. Posting this before it gets any further from canon. Please see end notes for further warnings.

It’s Tilly who figures him out, of course. But by then, she’s almost too late.

-

Paul had half suspected it would happen, had braced himself for it, but he is still unprepared for the visceral awfulness of seeing Hugh during the jump. 

“Hello, Paul,” Hugh says. He has half a smile on his face but Paul knows it’s not real. 

“You’re still here,” Paul says. “I wasn’t sure…”

“I’m still here,” Hugh says. And then the jump is over. 

Paul can’t deal with it, can’t handle the situation, so he just leaves. He can’t deal with a lot of things lately. He’s been angry at himself because he feels internally _wrecked_ by Hugh’s death but whatever the drive or the genetic manipulation did to him has made him feel like he’s constantly high, unable to actually sit with his grief and process anything that has happened. And now, now he’s pretty sure the grief is coming out sideways, making him hallucinate about Hugh instead. 

-

Tilly is happy to see an old friend on the Discovery, but she’s a little unsettled. After so many months on this ship, she was pretty sure she could recognize most personnel on sight, and it’s been months since they picked up anyone new other than Captain Pike and his officers from the Enterprise. 

But May is here, so clearly Tilly just isn’t as observant as she thinks she is. May must have changed her last name for some reason and that’s why the computer can’t find her quarters. Something must have gone wrong with the paperwork when she changed her name, or maybe there was another May Ahern who went to their school — unlikely but not impossible, there were two boys in their grade with the same first, middle, and last names who were totally unrelated. May obviously isn’t _dead_ , despite the computer listing a death date. The simplest explanation tends to be the right one, and paperwork issues happen. 

She does wish May would stick around long enough for her to ask what quarters she’s in, though. Whatever project she’s on must keep her really busy, because it seems like every time they run into each other, they never have time to actually talk and catch up before May is running off again.

-

“It's not that I’m not glad to see you,” Hugh says, “But you seem to be in here a lot lately.”

Paul doesn’t respond, just stares at him, drinking in the sight of his face. He still hasn’t told the ship’s counselor that he’s hallucinating Hugh here, because they would certainly put a stop to him making the jumps then. He _knows_ this isn’t real, knows this is no more Hugh than his old video messages and voicemails are, but the video messages don’t _talk back_. 

Hugh laughs uneasily in response to his prolonged silence. “Admittedly I don’t have the best grasp of the passage of time anymore.” 

“You talk to me,” Paul says. “You say things like that. It makes me think you’re real.”

“Well, I feel pretty real, aside from the fact that I’m dead,” Hugh says, and Paul flinches at the reminder. The jump ends. 

\- 

The last couple of weeks, Commander Stamets has been increasingly eager to volunteer for jumps. It’s kind of freaking Tilly out. 

He was so upset, weeks ago, the first time he went back in. She already felt awful about ignoring him the first time he’d mentioned that he’d seen Dr. Culber in there. She had thought at the time that it was just something he was saying out of grief. But when he mentioned it again, just before agreeing to go back to doing jumps, he’d been deadly serious. She doesn’t necessarily think that Dr. Culber is, like, trapped in the network or something, but it does seem like Commander Stamets hallucinated him there at some point, which is honestly pretty horrifying. 

He hasn’t mentioned it again, though, and he’s a sensible guy so she’s sure he would have mentioned it to the ship’s counselor if he was having hallucinations. Well, maybe. People tend to react pretty drastically to someone experiencing hallucinations, so maybe if it’s still happening, he’s keeping it to himself. She’s not sure _she_ would want to tell the counselor she was seeing dead people, in his situation. 

At any rate, whatever issue he had with the jumps must have been resolved, because his attitude toward them has taken a complete 180-degree turn. It seems like they jump everywhere now, even when they could warp there easily. Captain Pike has embraced using the drive wholeheartedly, which Tilly knows was the eventual goal of the project all along. Maybe Tilly just finds it strange because she’s not used to it yet. 

-

“You look unwell,” Hugh says. He touches Paul on the shoulder, gently palms his face and turns his head to examine him. “Are you sleeping enough? Are you eating regularly? I know things are hard right now, but —”

Paul shakes him off. “Why are you still trying to take care of me?”

“Because I love you,” Hugh says, sounding hurt.

The jump ends.

-

Tilly would not call herself the best at noticing other people’s emotional states even when she’s around them 24/7, but she’s pretty sure something is up with Commander Stamets. Aside from the obvious.

She knows that coping with the death of a loved one takes time, and that the mourning process is different for everybody, but he seems to be getting _worse_ rather than better. He’d been distracted and kind of, well, flat, during the first weeks when they’d gotten back to work after leaving Earth. That had been normal.

This level of distraction, though — Tilly couldn’t say exactly what it is, really, but something is different. This doesn’t seem like Stamets being distracted because he’s caught up in his thoughts or emotions. This seems like he’s just _not there_. She _knows_ that people experience emotions different ways, she keeps telling herself that, but if these episodes were happening to someone in any other circumstances she’d immediately think there was something physiologically wrong with them and that they needed immediate medical attention. But she doesn’t want to say anything, because while she’s improved at this over time, she knows she’s not the best judge of people’s emotional responses to things. 

She’s also pretty sure Stamets isn’t really eating. But again, she’s not sure enough to say anything about it. It’s not like she’s with him every hour of every day (although the way he’s been working lately, it’s getting close). But one day Stamets had turned down a lunch break when he normally would have gone with her and Michael, and he had declined their offer to bring something back, and something about it had made her start paying attention. And when she started paying attention, she noticed that he _never_ left for lunch breaks anymore. He’s there in the lab when she starts her shift, he stays the whole time, and he’s still there when she leaves. 

Tilly is pretty sure something is wrong, but she’s not sure what to do about it.

-

“This is more jumps than you ever used to make,” Hugh says. 

“It’s fine,” Paul says. It’s not fine. The more time he spends in here the less real he feels on the outside. The more he sees Hugh, the more painful it is when he has to leave. He knows it’s stupid, he knows it’s not the most rational explanation for what’s going on here, but he’s convinced himself that this is real and Hugh is actually here in the network with him. 

“You’re hurting yourself, coming in here so much. You don’t look well and I would bet that your brain scans aren't improving. Why are they making you jump so much?”

“It doesn’t hurt,” Paul says. He’s not lying. He’s been gradually upping the concentration of spores in the chamber over time, which not only puts him under more during the jumps but also makes their side effects last longer. It doesn’t hurt because it doesn’t feel like much of _anything_.

“You’re scaring me,” Hugh says. Paul can see it on his face. And he would feel bad about it, he really would, but the fact that he gets to see Hugh’s face _at all_ — 

The jump ends.

-

Tilly thinks she’s imagining it at first, but when she looks through the logs, she finds that her suspicions are correct.

The jumps are taking longer and longer each time. When looked at from jump to jump, from data point to next consecutive data point, it’s a small increase. Only a few seconds each time.

But Tilly just returned to the lab from three days she’d requested off duty to work on a paper she’d been meaning to write, and they had made a lot of jumps during that time, so to her the timing difference between the last jump she observed and the first one during her shift today is a full thirty-seven seconds. It’s noticeable. 

Normally she’d just talk to Commander Stamets about it. But normally, really, Stamets would have already noticed something like this and been investigating it. The fact that he hasn’t increases her already-present worry that something isn’t right with him and that he needs medical attention, not to be working twelve-hour shifts every day. 

-

“Please, Paul,” Hugh begs him. “You need to stop this.”

Paul squeezes Hugh’s hands where they’re clasped in his own. “I can’t do that. You know I can’t.”

“It’s because of me, isn’t it,” Hugh says. “You’re making extra jumps because of me.”

Paul doesn’t answer.

“I’m dead, Paul. I love getting to see you here, I love you, don’t mistake me, but —”

The jump ends. 

-

“I can hear him screaming,” May says, very matter of fact. When Tilly looks back, she’ll identify this moment as the point at which she realized that May was actually, truly dead, not just misfiled by some bizarre records glitch in the computer. But right now, as she’s living it, she’s mostly just confused.

“You can hear _who_ screaming?” Tilly asks. She glances around. There’s no one in this corridor with them, and honestly she’s not even sure why May is in this corridor either. All it leads to is the spore drive lab, which May isn’t assigned to. 

“Your doctor friend,” May says. 

“Doctor … Pollard?”

“No, silly! The one your supervisor is so upset about. They must really miss each other, but I hear them fighting about it a lot.” May looks at her like this is the most obvious information in the world, but nothing she’s saying makes any sense.

“May, are you talking about Dr. Culber?”

“Is that his name? Your supervisor calls him Hugh. He is _very_ upset today, oh my,” May says, glancing back over her shoulder toward the door to the lab. She shakes her head. “They really do not need to fight so much. Everything will work itself out in time, I’m sure!” 

“But May, Dr. Culber is, uh, he died. Months ago. May, he’s dead.”

May flaps a hand at her. “Oh, Stilly, it’s not like you to be so narrow-minded. Don’t you know that nothing is ever truly gone?”

It’s that phrasing, so close to what Commander Stamets said to her weeks ago just before he first started using the spore drive again, that moves Tilly to action. She pushes past May, peripherally noting that she also seems to have pushed _through_ May, and palms open the door to the lab. 

And there, in the reaction cube, is Commander Stamets. His eyes are closed and his face is slack. Spores float lazily around the chamber, almost sparkling in the bright light. They’re not in a black alert. No jump is happening right now. Stamets must have reprogrammed the controls to engage without an active jump in progress.

Tilly rushes to the reaction chamber, certain now that something is very, very wrong. She’s not sure how to disengage the safety locks and flush the chamber with clean air; all of that usually happens automatically at the end of the jump now that the system is actually in use, so she’d have to go figure out what Stamets did to the controls or try to initialize one of the old test run protocols to be able to get in. She wrenches the handle to the chamber door, but of course it doesn’t budge. “Computer, disengage reaction cube safety locks. This is a medical emergency.” 

“ _Permission denied. Command override required._ ”

“Dammit! You — ugh.” Tilly smacks her palm against the glass a couple of times, hoping to wake up Stamets so he can disengage the locks himself. He is, of course, non-responsive. Tilly has some suspicions about what Dr. Culber, if he or May or any of what appears to be going on here is real, might be so livid about. 

-

It takes a couple minutes for Hugh to notice.

“Paul, you really shouldn’t — hold on, we’re not moving,” he says, interrupting his own attempts to coerce Paul into taking better care of himself.

“We’re not,” Paul says. The difference in the sensation of being in this not-quite-real world isn’t that much, when they’re in motion, but it’s enough that he can tell his changes to the drive control system were successful and he hasn’t accidentally initiated an unintended jump. 

“You’re not even making a jump?” Hugh asks, but the scowl on his face tells Paul that he already knows the answer. Paul doesn't respond.

“Don’t do this to me, Paul. Do you understand me? You can’t stay in here with me. The only thing that makes being here bearable is knowing that you’re okay. I’d rather never see you again than have you be trapped in here with me.” Hugh shakes him lightly by his shoulders. “Do you understand?”

“I understand that I’d rather be trapped in here with you than never see you again,” Paul says. 

“No,” Hugh says.

“I’ve already done it,” Paul says quietly.

“Then _undo it_ ,” Hugh says, his voice getting louder, more frantic with each word. “You’re smart, you made this happen, you can unmake it. You’re still alive, you don’t belong here, you have to _wake up_.”

“You don’t understand,” Paul says, feeling calm even though Hugh is basically shouting directly into his face. It doesn’t matter. He’s here with Hugh and that’s what matters. 

“I understand that I’m not fucking doing this! I’m not watching you do this to yourself, I’ll leave first.”

Now this, this makes Paul feel something other than calm. “No! Hugh —”

And then he’s being roughly shaken awake, Tilly looming over him, Dr. Pollard and Commander Saru on his other side. “—amets! Commander Stamets, wake up!” Tilly looks like she’s about to cry, and Paul knows that in any other circumstances he’d be very concerned about that, but right now all he can think about is the fact that they’d _woken him up_. 

“You should have left me there,” Paul says. Tilly starts crying for real, then.

“Let’s get you to sickbay,” Dr. Pollard says. Paul lets it happen. He knows he won’t get this chance again. He’s pretty sure Hugh wouldn’t be there anymore anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> Extra warnings: Paul engages in risky behavior involving his use of the drive and eventually does something that would be life-threatening. While this is not a deliberate suicide attempt, he is severely depressed and this incident is a result of that.


End file.
